actually, you should be able to do an end run around the whole thing by using the extracted autodoc blob. if there were an xpath implementation, getting the documentation for any method/constant/etc would be a trivial operation. even without xpath, it's still probably easier than reinventing the wheel.
Bill
i am not yet sure how to handle those, but i think the best option would be to create a compact version of plaintext docs or possibly encode the AutoDoc objects into files, while pike is being compiled. these files could then be distributed with pike as "runtime docs"